Within hours of the Obama administration’s tentative indication on Friday that President Barack Obama might be willing to meet with new Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, an influential Republican member of Congress cautioned that the administration should not put much faith in Tehran’s recent diplomatic overtures.

The White House intimated on Friday that a summit meeting between Obama and Rouhani might take place when both leaders are in New York for the annual UN General Assembly meeting next week.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, White House deputy spokesman Josh Earnest said the US would be ready to engage in talks “on the basis of mutual respect” with Iran over its disputed nuclear program. Earnest said the White House wants Tehran to prove that its program is only for civilian purposes.

The US, UN and many Western nations believe the program is intended to grant Iran the capability to construct nuclear weapons.

“Rouhani is a master of deceit who has been putting on an all-out charm offensive since he took office,” Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement Friday.

“In many ways Rouhani is much more dangerous than [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. At least with Ahmadinejad you get what you see – his hatred for Israel and the United States is not disguised with rhetoric or spurious gestures of goodwill,” added Ros-Lehtinen, who is considered a staunchly pro-Israel member of the House of Representatives.

;Ahmadinejad has openly called for Israel’s destruction and repeatedly denied the Holocaust.

“Rouhani, on the other hand, has managed to fool many with his manipulating words and his dog and pony show, and some have been so hopeful that he will be any different than Ahmadinejad that they have swallowed his act hook, line and sinker,” Ros-Lehtinen continued.

But, she warned, “Rouhani has no control over Iran’s nuclear program, and he will not change the regime’s stance on Israel. He is a regime loyalist, staunch supporter of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and vehemently opposes Israel and [the] Jewish State’s right to exist. His latest acts of tweeting a Rosh Hashana message and having the only Jewish member of the Iranian Majlis accompany him at the UN [are] all just smoke and mirrors.”

Rouhani “will use any opportunity he can to try to fool the US and the West into offering concessions and to stall for time while Iran completes its nuclear weapons program, as he had bragged about doing once before. Believing that he has any other agenda is folly.”

She concluded with a message for the White House.

“The Administration must not fall for this charm offensive, and must increase the pressure on the regime with more sanctions until Iran completely abandons its nuclear pursuit and dismantles its program.”

Thursday, September 19, 2013

The Palestinian people, according to a recent study by the Jerusalem Institute of Justice, have received per capita, adjusted for inflation, 25 times more aid than did Europeans to rebuild war-torn Western Europe under the Marshall plan after the Second World War.Most of these funds, according to the study, reached the Palestinian people through The United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).UNRWA is the only UN refugee agency dedicated to a single group of people, and the only agency that designates individuals as original refugees if they have lived in areas effected by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, for a minimum of only two years, before being displaced. UNRWA is also the only UN agency that designates the descendants of the original refugees as refugees as well – even though 90% of UNRWA-designated refugees have never actually been displaced.UNRWA, furthermore, violates the UNHCR Refugee Convention by insisting that two million people (40% of UNWRA's beneficiaries) who have been given full citizenship in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, are nevertheless still classified as refugees, and by encouraging them to act on a "right of return."
Although, since World War II, fifty million people have been displaced by armed conflict, the Palestinian people are the only ones in history to receive this special treatment.
Before describing why UNRWA is a body that drastically reduces any chance of a lasting peace, let's take a look at which citizens are funding UNWRA. After all: "There is no such thing as public money, there is only taxpayers' money."
The total 2012 UNRWA budget was $907,907,371. Although the permanent supportive rhetoric for the "Palestinian case" from the Muslim world might lead one to expect that UNWRA is funded mainly by Muslim countries, in fact UNRWA is almost entirely funded by Western taxpayers: The USA, EU, UK, Sweden, Norway, Germany, The Netherlands and Japan pay $644,701,999, or 71% of the annual UNRWA budget. The funds from the second largest donor, the EU, are of course already composed of EU taxes from its member states.
So where do the Muslim states rank? First in, at #15, is Saudi Arabia. The land of palaces and private gold leaf painted Airbus A380's on the Royal runways chipped in $12,030,540 -- less than half of a tiny country such as the Netherlands. Second, at #18, is Turkey, the supposedly economically flourishing state of a prime minister who zealously supports Hamas, but which contributes only $8,100,000. Qatar, which stands accused of paying millions in bribes to win the bid to host the 2022 World Cup, and is now spending millions on the construction of high end soccer stadiums, contributed exactly $0 to its Palestinian brothers in faith.
These figures also reflect the nature of the role Muslim countries play in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. In their rhetoric, they are permanently hostile towards Israel and sympathetic to slogans such as: "Free Palestine," still basically a euphemism for "Destroy Israel." Even this meager support, however, appears to strengthen the Palestinian leadership's resolve to say no to peace whenever that occasion arises. The non-existence of peace, however, is what perpetuates Palestinian agony, along with Muslim states' refusal to deliver anything helpful when it comes to either the material needs or the human rights of the Palestinians. The role of most Muslim states in the conflict therefore seems a subversive one, aimed at the perpetuation of Palestinian suffering to divert attention from their own deficiencies such as their terrible human right record, lack of democracy, and the repression of their own peoples; Assad allegedly lavishly paid Syrian Palestinians to storm the Israeli border in 2011, to divert attention away from his bloody crackdown on his countrymen and to let the world media focus on Israel shooting Palestinians on the border.Muslim states use the Palestinian people as pawns in a hostile game of chess against Israel.
Now that we know where the money does and does not come from, it might be helpful to review how UNWRA spends it. Just a minor detail to keep in mind along the way: The personal wealth of PA president Abbas is estimated at $100 million. UNWRA also funds for Palestinian children summer camps in which the entire focus seems to emphasize the children's right of return to the villages in which their grandparents are said to have lived, as well as the means to achieve this: Jihad – as shown in a rather disturbing documentary, Camp Jihad, produced by David Bedein.
In one scene from it, for example, a woman asks children to tell her where they are from. They respond with Jaffa, Haifa and so on, but admit they have never been to these places. The woman then shouts: "We will return to our villages with power and honor. With god's help and our own strength we will wage war and with education and jihad we will return!"

A still shot from the documentary film "Camp Jihad".

In another scene, a group of even younger children is told by a woman in traditional Arab clothing that: "Our grandparents were having a BBQ on the beach, and then a wolf appeared. Who was the wolf? The Jews. What did the Jews do to us? They expelled and deported us. They killed us and shot our families."
Apart from summer camps like these, the whole implementation of UNWRA might actually be counterproductive. If the entire Palestinian Authority leadership lives off an international welfare check that only arrives annually because the conflict still exits, there isn't much incentive for ending the conflict.
But there might be something more fundamental at play. German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn's 2003 book, Sons and World Power, explores the relation between war and the number of males in a society. Heinsohn writes:

[D]espite claiming that it wants to bring peace to the region, the West continues to make the population explosion in Gaza worse every year. By generously supporting UNRWA's budget, the West assists a rate of population increase that is 10 times higher than in its own countries. Much is being said about Iran waging a proxy war against Israel by supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. One may argue that by fueling Gaza's untenable population explosion, the West unintentionally finances a war-by-proxy against the Jews of Israel.If we seriously want to avoid another generation of war in Gaza, we must have the courage to tell the Gazans that they will have to start looking after their children themselves, without UNRWA's help. This would force Palestinians to focus on building an economy instead of freeing them up to wage war. Of course, every baby lured into the world by our money up to now would still have our assistance.
If we make this urgently needed reform, then by at least 2025 many boys in Gaza -- as in Algeria -- would…be able to look forward to a more secure future in a less violent society.

Despite the many subversive factors UNRWA adds to an already volatile situation, however, there is outspoken Israeli support for UNRWA. These voices, however, always strongly emphasize that UNRWA should limit its work to humanitarian missions, and refrain from political alignment – even though this train has long-since left the station. In 1967 the Comay-Michelmore Exchange of Letters initiated Israel's policy of cooperation with UNRWA. As recent as 2009 this policy was reaffirmed by a representative of the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry, Dr. Uri Resnick, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he proposed to maintain "close coordination."
In 2010, Canada's government of Stephen Harper redirected its UNRWA funding directly to the Palestinian Authority to increase accountability. In 2011 the Dutch government announced it would thoroughly review its UNRWA policy. The Israeli government urged its allies to leave their UNRWA policies as they were. As Steven Rosen and Daniel Pipes explain:

Israeli officials distinguish between UNRWA's negative political role and its more positive role as a social service agency providing assistance, primarily medical and educational. They appreciate that UNRWA, with funds provided by foreign governments, helps one third of the population in the West Bank and three-quarters in Gaza. Without these funds, Israel could face an explosive situation on its borders and international demands that it, depicted as the "occupying power," assume the burden of care for these populations. In the extreme case, the Israel Defense Forces would have to enter hostile areas to oversee the running of schools and hospitals, for which the Israeli taxpayer would have to foot the bill – a most unattractive prospect. As a well-informed Israeli official sums it up, UNRWA plays a "key role in supplying humanitarian assistance to the civilian Palestinian population" that must be sustained.

By perpetuating the Palestinians' refugee status and enabling a demographic that does not educate its members for peace, UNRWA is an obstacle to peace. Ironically, however, UNRWA's humanitarian work relieves Israel of the hypothetical "responsibility" of caring for over five million Palestinians.
Can the West, as UNRWA's largest funder, do anything to realize a more balanced UNRWA policy? In the same piece Rosen and Pipes offer an option that unfortunately has not yet been put in to practice:

Can the elements of UNRWA useful to Israel be retained without perpetuating the refugee status? Yes, but this requires distinguishing UNRWA's role as a social service agency from its role producing ever-more refugees. Contrary to its practice of registering grandchildren as refugees, Section III.A.2 and Section III.B of UNRWA's Consolidated Eligibility & Registration Instructions allow it to provide social services to Palestinians without defining them as refugees. This provision is already in effect: in the West Bank, for example, 17% of the Palestinians registered with UNRWA in January 2012 and eligible to receive its services were not listed as refugees.Given that UNRWA reports to the UN General Assembly, with its automatic anti-Israel majority, mandating a change in UNRWA practices is nearly impossible. But major UNRWA donors, starting with the US government, should stop being accomplices to UNRWA's perpetuation of the refugee status.

Donor states should, therefore, consider attaching strict conditions to their funding.
With its annual $233,328,550 donation, the US should take the lead, and individual EU member states could inquire what the actual share of each is in the annual $204,098,161 EU donation, and then seriously consider imposing conditions on delivering this share.If the current situation is left untouched, the Palestinians are left suffering, fed on dreams and violence.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

No matter how hard or how often we Muslims try, we are never able finally to end the connection our lives seem to have with the lives of the Jews. Watching Arab and Islamic television, especially during the holy month of Ramadan, brings the viewer to the inescapable conclusion that we have no real lives of our own, no unity and no value: our only motivation is having the Jews as a common enemy, with our lives dependent on them. We treat the Jews the way the rabid Christian anti-Semites treated them in the Middle Ages, blaming them for every illness, tragedy and misfortune. We blame [Jews] for the failures of Islam while only we [Muslims] are at fault for the catastrophes that befall us.
Almost no Ramadan evening goes by without tedious "historical" dramas on Al-Jazeera and the other Arab TV channels, whose objective is to brainwash viewers with anti-Semitic propaganda. They deal with the Jews' denial of the Prophet Muhammad's message, Jewish attempts to poison him and their betrayal of him at the Battle of the Trench in Al-Medina. Almost all the series' end on the same note: the message is always that the fate of the Jews in the Palestine they stole from the Arabs will be the same as that Muhammad wreaked on them at Khybar, they will be slaughtered and their women and children will be sold into slavery.

A still shot from the anti-Semitic TV miniseries "Khaybar". (Image credit: MEMRI)

...the situation has reached such proportions within the nation of Islam that it is now a national mental illness, a collective obsession for which I see no cure. We accuse the Jews of wanting to rule the world, but one of the causes of our illness is that we expect Islam to take over the world.
Regression and the lack of social and governmental flexibility, along with poverty and ignorance, perpetuate the impotence of the nation of Islam and make it impossible for us to change, develop and progress -- a frustrating, ugly situation. While we have dreams of ruling the world, we wallow in disease and poverty, and we are behind the times in all the modern fields of endeavor. Our various regimes enjoy religious and tribal backing, that is why they are anti-democratic and cannot be saved. We find comfort only in recklessly bringing untold masses of children into a world with nothing to offer them.
The countries of western Europe were all lucky enough, or wise enough, to cast off the political rule of fanaticism in the Middle Ages and to separate church and state. Today Christianity is a normative social value, a matter of personal conscience, and it dictates and practices enlightenment rather than violence and oppression. The separation of church and state made it possible for Europeans – and Americans – to progress, and it gave them a tremendous advantage over the rest of the world. We, on the other hand, are still living in the Dark Ages.
The Christians' enlightened, moderate attitude toward the Islamic communities in European cities, which is partially a function of fear, causes our extremist Muslim brothers to escalate their violence toward the communities hosting them, mistakenly assuming that Christian moderation is the result of the weakness of Western society. The result is that as time passes Islamophobia grows greater.
Despite the new Enlightenment, many Europeans, among them the leaders of the European Union, are still fundamentally and militantly anti-Semitic. Instead of attacking the Jews head-on the way their ancestors did -- by simply passing discriminatory laws, forcing them to live in ghettoes and killing them -- they now politically correctly attack Israel, pretending that Israelis are not Jews. Beneath their political correctness their ancient, inbred anti-Semitism still smolders. For some Christians, as for the Muslims, hatred of the Jews is built on an ancient religious foundation, a legacy from the Middle Ages, and it is so basic and so well rooted that they are willing to support the Muslims in almost anything, as long as it harms the Jews in some way.
...we Muslims make the mistake of thinking Europeans really care about them, especially the Palestinians. We are wrong: Europeans simply hate the Jews more than they hate and fear us. The bitter truth is that the Europeans usually intervene in a crisis only if it gives them the opportunity for Jew-bashing. When hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Muslims are slaughtered – by other Muslims, such as the massacre in Syria and the recent upsurge of violence in Darfur – the apathetic European leadership does not lift a finger. At the same time, the European Union is obsessed with its need to condemn, sanction and boycott the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. It does not even mention Syria, with its hundred thousand civilians murdered by the government and its millions of refugees, or the atrocities being committed in the Arab-Muslim world, the rapes of women and children, the beheadings and the wanton cruelty and murder, to say nothing of exploitation, discrimination, slavery and other crimes against humanity.To my great sorrow, everywhere in the world where there are Muslims there is murder, mass bloodshed and terrorist attacks. We should leave the Jews alone, they are not responsible for our tragedies and hating them will not cure the nation of Islam or bring it successfully into the 21st century.

“Bad guys” backed by Iran are worse for Israel than “bad guys” who are not supported by the Islamic Republic, Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US Michael Oren told The Jerusalem Post in a parting interview.

Oren... traced the evolution of Israel’s message on Syria during the three weeks of the chemical weapons crisis.

“The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” he said.

This was the case, he said, even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated to al-Qaida.

“We understand that they are pretty bad guys,” he said, adding that this designation did not apply to everyone in the Syrian opposition.

“... the greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut.

And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. That is a position we had well before the outbreak of hostilities in Syria. With the outbreak of hostilities we continued to want Assad to go.”

Amid reports that Assad may be moving some of his chemical weapons arsenal out of the country, Oren reiterated Israel’s position that it will not tolerate attempts to transfer these arms – or game changing weapons – to Hezbollah.

“The chemical weapons were an American red line, it wasn’t an Israel red line,” Oren said. “Our red line was that if Iran and Syria try to convey chemical weapons or game changing weaponry to Hezbollah or other terrorist organizations, that Israel would not remain passive. We were prepared to stand by the red line, and still are.”

Oren, who said he could not verify reports Assad was already moving his arsenal, stressed that “he is not moving them out to Hezbollah.”

...Oren – who has contact in Washington with some ambassadors from Persian Gulf countries – said that that “in the last 64 years there has probably never been a greater confluence of interest between us and several Gulf States. With these Gulf States we have agreements on Syria, on Egypt, on the Palestinian issue. We certainly have agreements on Iran. This is one of those opportunities presented by the Arab Spring.”

Also, calling “overblown” reports that young American Jews were becoming distant from Israel, Oren sounded an upbeat and optimistic note about the future of American Jewry.

“Certain physicists say that the universe is expanding and contracting at the same time, the same thing is true of the American-Jewish community,” he said. “This means that it is contracting through assimilation, but there is a core of the American-Jewish community coming out of day schools, Orthodox environments, Jewishly educated and deeply connected to Israel and the Jewish people. And that core is expanding.”

“I am actually optimistic about the future of American Jewry,” he said. “I don’t know whether American Jewry will be the same size as it is now in some 30 years, but it will be more Jewishly educated, committed and attached to Israel.”

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

...The hazards of adopting a ‘black and white’ moralistic approach to questions of international law – especially in connection with the Israel- Palestinian conflict – were laid bare by Prof. Michael Curtis of Rutgers University in a groundbreaking article in 1991. To paraphrase Curtis,

dogmatic generalisations about the legality or illegality of Israel’s West Bank settlements belong in the realm of polemics, not serious legal analysis.

The basic error is to treat all the settlements alike when commenting on their international legality. For example, settlements that have been built without the authorization of the Israeli government have been held by the Supreme Court to be illegal even under Israeli domestic law. Conversely, Cambridge University Prof. James Crawford, who is one of the world’s most eminent international lawyers and is generally critical of Israeli policies, published a legal opinion in 2012, in which he concluded that some of the settlements, such as those of the IDF’s Nahal outposts are “probably lawful.”

The whole question of the international legality of settlements is fraught with complexity – which is one of the reasons Crawford’s opinion runs to 60 pages. He and others have argued that Article 49, paragraph 6, of the Fourth Geneva Convention (Geneva IV) prohibits civilian settlements. It states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

Nobody suggests that the Israeli government has deported settlers to the West Bank. The legal question is whether by sponsoring and financing civilian settlements, the Israeli government has carried out a population “transfer.” In its advisory opinion in 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) answered this question in the affirmative.

The late Julius Stone, an outstanding Australian international jurist, had a contrary opinion. His view was that a population “transfer” within the meaning of Article 49(6) requires a “magisterial act” or fiat by the government of the occupier state. In his view, which is still shared by many eminent international lawyers, mere sponsorship and benefits do not amount to a population “transfer.”

In any event, the ICJ’s advisory opinion was just that – a non-binding opinion. Like the endlessly repeated UN resolutions on the subject referred to by Kretzmer, it has no legally binding effect. In fact, the ICJ’s conclusions were subjected to some serious criticisms, not least because the questions referred to it by the UN General Assembly were so loaded with tendentious assumptions as to prejudice fair determination of the issues.

The ICJ also failed to consider the effect of the original League of Nations Mandate of 1922, which recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and authorized “close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands.”

When the UN replaced the League in 1945, the Mandate continued to operate by virtue of Article 80 of the UN Charter. Kretzmer waves this history aside as having been made irrelevant by the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 as the State of the Jewish people.

He leaves unanswered the opinion of Eugene Rostow, a former Dean of Yale Law School and US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, that because the West Bank is an unallocated part of the British Mandate, its terms still apply to that territory and settlements can continue until a new state is created or an annexation takes place.

The misuse of international law as a tool of political condemnation is especially unhelpful right now while Israeli and Palestinian representatives attempt to negotiate comprehensive terms of peace on the basis of “two states for two peoples.” Moralistic polemics about the settlements is the last thing needed by negotiators on either side, and will simply make it politically more difficult for Palestinian leaders to agree to a land swap arrangement, a sine qua non of any final peace agreement.

*Attorney Peter Wertheim is the Executive Director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry

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